Advice for all interested in the Haas School of Business

exploration

In a couple of days, one more semester will start, leading to another semester of accomplishments and mistakes, happiness and sorrows, love and heartbreak. I know I’m looking forward to it! (Not being sarcastic here, I swear)

When the semester ended, I had talked with a couple of freshmen who were anxious and disappointed of how their first semester at Cal turned out. Some didn’t get the grades they wanted. Some decided to switch majors halfway through. Some didn’t find where they belonged.

When I completed my first semester, I pretty much embodied all of these problems. I didn’t meet what I thought would be a “core” group of friends. I thought getting anything below a 4.0 was a terrible GPA (that high school mentality showing). I didn’t really like business or linguistics. I stayed in my dorm a lot, my floor wasn’t social, I didn’t get along with my roommate, and didn’t enjoy my extracurriculars of that semester. I didn’t like what I was doing, didn’t have direction, and didn’t feel like I belonged.

I write this tonight as I take a break from writing code for Computer Science 61A, or Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, taught through the programming language of Python. This course is the first class for computer science majors, and known for being a notoriously difficult class. As I’m interested in technical recruiting, I wanted to give it a shot this summer, while simultaneously taking on a part-time job (I think of it as a paid internship) in San Francisco, updating the blog, and figuring out a better way to represent my personal website. And boy is this tough. (This relates to Haas! Keep reading!)